Within You
by Megilhirile
Summary: Sarah, now an English professor in her early 40s, struggles with the choices she made back in the Labyrinth.
1. Chapter 1: Floating

Sarah's eyes traced the curls of cigarette smoke as they lazily drifted up to brush with the ceiling. The way the tendrils embraced and caressed the poorly-stippled and water-stained ceiling made her uncomfortable, made her feel vulnerable, exposed. The smoke was so intimate with the ceiling. Perhaps she shivered ever so slightly because she felt the bed move as James - or was it Tom? ...David? What was the boy's name? - rolled over.

"Are you alright?" His words seemed almost empty, like he wasn't entirely certain she would respond, but there was a tenor to them that suggested he really did worry about her answer. Sarah had to wonder if this had happened before with him, if she had acted so spacey on all of their...dates, if you could call them that. She had been seeing James - she was fairly certain his name was James - for a couple of months now, taking him along to the occasional dinner or reading, mostly accompanying him to hazy, poorly-lit bars. There he could talk to friends while she stared blankly into a glass of some honey-colored drink - bourbon, whisky, cognac, whatever. God, was she distant. She couldn't even remember his name when it mattered.

Thinking back on it, Sarah realised that she couldn't really remember half of her dates with James, either. It wasn't that she had forgotten them because was drunk or high, it was that they had been so uneventful and lackluster. They were boring. Why was she seeing this boy? _NO, he's a MAN_, she had to remind herself. A beautiful, young, innocent man, but a man nonetheless. And he was pretty, that was for sure. Pale, blonde, skinny...British. The way he held a cigarette in his mouth was so sexy it made her bones ache, though his fingertips were stained and his clothes reeked.

A moment of silence had passed.

"Yeah, I'm ok." She rolled over and snaked an arm around his middle. "I'm just cold." _That's right_, Sarah thought to herself. _I'm a cold and distant bitch, and I'm sorry._

Most notable, Sarah thought, was how young he was. He still had some baby fat on him; his cheeks were full, and his skin was still elastic. The crinkles that happened around his eyes when he smiled dissolved when the smile was over. Sarah's didn't. You could count the number of times she had smiled just by looking at her face. Not that she would really let anyone look at her face long enough to notice that it was in just as poor shape as the ceiling of her flat. Stippled and water-stained.

"Why are you with me, James?" Sarah had blurted out the words before she had even thought them, really. She knew why she was with him, to a certain extent. She craved him; he fulfilled some visceral desire of hers. But she didn't love him, and she knew he could tell that. Why was he wasting his time on her?

Another moment of silence passed. Sarah felt his muscles tense, his breathing shallowed. A slight hiss as he sucked in another mouthful of cigarette smoke. Sarah waited. She had time.

...time that was passing ever so slowly. Was the clock even ticking? All the background noise in the apartment seemed to fade away, as she felt heat rising to her chest and flooding out to the tips of her arms and legs. The tenseness of the moment was consuming...

There! Release; the clock had ticked again, and almost instantly the fire in her veins diminished. The sound of the apartment flooded back in...it was so loud. She could barely even hear James breathing for the noise of the heater and the mild hum of the fridge and the electrical buzz from the lamp by her bed. But then even those sounds returned to normal, and James' breath drew raggedly.

"I worship you, Sarah." His voice was dogged, tired, vulnerable. Sarah thought of the cigarette smoke touching the ceiling, searching out and delicately fingering the ceiling's most intimate recesses. Sarah moved her arm away from James for a split second, afraid of touching those intimate parts of him, afraid of tainting them, of hurting them.

James noticed her slight movement, though. He turned to look at her, his cigarette hanging loosely from his lips as he perused her face. Sarah processed then that he had been pointedly avoiding looking at her the whole morning. She was scared. The fire that had filled her a minute ago was now ice. He was searching her face, looking into her eyes with such a coldly passionate stare, searching for...something. For what? What did he need from her? What could she give to him to acknowledge his vulnerability?

"Ok." The words were anticlimactic. They weren't what James needed. Sarah couldn't figure out how to say anything meaningful. She felt swallowed up, drifting around, not able to connect with reality. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to acknowledge him, receive him, return the emotion.

Maybe James saw that. She had expected him to get up, to put his clothes on, to burn with some kind of quiet anger as he thrust his feet into a pair of leather boots..._oh god, leather boots_. But he didn't. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, put it out on an ashtray by the bed, and then moved so that he was on top of her. He was still looking at her with a penetrating stare, but he leaned in and slowly, softly, pressed his lips against hers. The kiss barely lasted a minute, but it communicated everything. It was electric. Sarah buzzed.

And then James rolled back over, getting up out of bed. He retrieved the fag from the ashtray; its fire hadn't yet been quelled. He pulled on a pair of pants, khaki and loose, with a drawstring at the waist that he tied in order to keep the pants from slipping off. And then the leather boots. _He is so fucking artsy_, Sarah noticed. There was a quiet theatricality about him, a modest, demure, British sense of dramatics. Once the boots were on, he leaned in and gave her another kiss. "I'll see you in class, Professor," he whispered, and left, moving through the room like a quiet hurricane.


	2. Chapter 2: Déjà vu

It had been early dawn when James had left, and Sarah fell into a deep sleep almost immediately. It was the kind of sleep where she would wake up when the alarm went off and there would be deep imprints of the sheets all over her legs, and her body would feel too heavy and respond just a half-second too slowly. Sarah had gotten used to this kind of sleep… it didn't happen often, but there was a quality to it that was familiar. When she woke up, it didn't feel like she was waking up, it felt like she was being dragged across the membranes that separate worlds.

Sarah's alarm went off at 9, which gave her about half an hour before she needed to be out the door. Her first class began at 10, giving her just enough time to relax and imbibe a cup of what she called a caffé maté – half a cup of coffee mixed with half a cup of yerba maté and a splash of heavy cream. It tasted horrible in a way that wasn't foul, but she liked it; it shocked her body into wakefulness. Toby, with his suburbanite hauteur, considered her drink blasphemous and offensive. "Isn't the _point_ of maté to have something that isn't caffeinated? Never mind the fact that it tastes _terrible_." To which Sarah would only smirk and add a pinch of red pepper to his Ethiopian when he wasn't looking. This morning, though, her drink didn't seem to help her sluggishness. She had been staring into her coffee watching the way the liquid folded into miniscule waves at the edges of the cup when she realised it was already 20 after 9 and she needed clothes.

The skirt and stockings Sarah had been wearing last night were slung across the back of her sofa from when James had removed them before they crawled into bed. Sarah picked them up, slipping the skirt over her head and reaching around to zip it closed, brushing the lap with her palms to lessen the wrinkles. Although the skirt smelled like whatever smoky bar she and James had descended upon last night, it was the only semi-clean one left. The stockings, however, were too sweaty and disgusting to reuse. Sarah tossed them towards the clothes basket in the corner of the room and sought a new pair, as well as an appropriate blouse. She found one that would do, as long as she didn't lean over too far while lecturing. She chugged the rest of her cup of...stuff and rushed out the door.

Outside the air was cold and dry, and Sarah realised she had forgotten her coat. She walked briskly across the parking garage to her assigned spot and started the engine of her car, stamping her feet and making herself small until the heat got going hot enough to keep her warm. Only then did she bump the transmission into reverse and pull out of her space. At the first red light she reached into her glove box and pulled out a cigarette, flipped open her lighter and lit the damn thing, feeling ever more anxious until the filtered end was between her lips and she'd gotten the first mouthful of smoke.

During the drive, Sarah considered the way last night had played out. She and James had ended up at some posh new underground bar, where the owners acted like beatniks and the clientele smoked cloves and drank Hemingways. There had been a live pianist, and the air was full of smoke, and Sarah had drunk quite a few gin and tonics. Eventually the air started to look like it was shimmering, and Sarah began to feel light-headed and the smell of the cloves started to get to her and she found James and insisted they go home. That was when she started feeling like she had lost her grip, and on the car ride home she'd started _seeing_ things. There had been a white room, with platforms of varying heights and the walls had been covered in white velvet curtains. There were people in dresses made out of tulle and men wearing glittered masks with long noses, and the vision had felt tangible. She remembered feeling like she could reach out and grab a handful of lace and sequins. And the whole time it was like someone was watching her.

By the time they made it home, Sarah's visions had stopped, but she still had that nagging feeling that there were eyes in the darkness, following her and keeping track of her. James had helped her upstairs and had removed her clothes, and covered her with his own naked body, enveloping her and keeping her focused on him. His blue eyes were hypnotizing, and she stopped paying attention to the phantoms in the room and instead got caught up in the slickness of his skin and the way his muscles bunched and grew taught and relaxed. By the time they'd finished having sex, she'd forgotten about the white room, though her anxiety and detachment were still there. Then James had left and she'd fallen asleep and now here she was, jittery from her caffé maté and fretful about what had happened to her last night.

As Sarah dragged on her cigarette, she realised that it had been almost ten years since her last…_episode_. She cringed internally at the word; her therapist used it to describe those times like last night, when her sense of reality slipped and she found herself immersed in some fantastical alternate reality, but she really hated the word. It made her feel like her life was a serial drama, like she was a character written for the screen. And it didn't help that her therapist used the word in a scathing manner. _I should probably get a new therapist_, she thought as she flicked her ashes out the window.

About twelve years ago, Toby forced Sarah to talk to someone. "A professional, Sarah, not some art student you find at the bar." She didn't listen at first, or even after the third or fourth time Toby suggested it, but eventually Toby had stopped recommending and started making phone calls for her. He was tired of the way she was dealing with things, getting strung out, fucking young impressionable men that she found at the university bars. Eventually Toby found Dr. Froud, who had been a good therapist, prescribing anti-anxiety pills for Sarah until he realised she was just using them for the high and wasn't trying to get better. Froud kicked her out after that, and Toby made a few more calls.

Which landed her at the door of a therapist named King. His manner was obtuse; he was rude, condescending, arrogant. She cooperated with him because it meant she could get out of his office and away from him sooner. Her sessions with him helped her learn techniques to deal with her fantastical thoughts. She could recognize when something wasn't real and wrap it up in a box with a pretty bow and store it away. And although some of her coping mechanisms were…less than favorable, they were working; she hadn't had a relapse for almost ten years.

Until last night. Last night, something was different. Sarah couldn't quite place her finger on it, and she knew the thought would trouble her all afternoon until she had the chance to sit down and really think about it. But for now, she pulled into her parking space on the university campus. She threw away her fag in one of those special cylinders scattered about campus, the ones with the hole that was only big enough to slip a cigarette into, and trudged across the green to the building where her class met. She walked into the room, set her things down on the giant table at the front of the auditorium. She scanned the crowd and noticed…James.

His eyes. Those beautiful, blue, deep eyes. They were watching her, and the hairs on the back of her neck prickled. Déjà vu.


	3. Chapter 3: Coherence

It was probably the least coherent lecture Sarah had given in all her time on the university staff. While for any other faculty member, this might not be a significant statement; for Sarah, it most certainly was. Her lifestyle was not particularly conducive to early morning classes, and there were countless times she had lectured while hung over from the night before. And there were at least 3 times she had lectured while still drunk from not yet having gone to bed. But there is this peculiar tendency of drunken and hung over persons to remain relatively lucid on a topic about which they are comfortable and competent enough to talk. This quality is not recognizable in persons who are merely distracted.

And Sarah was most certainly distracted. She was supposed to be talking about Daedalus and the Minotaur, but instead she was noticing the tightness of James' pants, the peculiar color of his hair, the leather boots he was so fond of. She was also noticing how he seemed to always be looking at her, never breaking eye contact.

But then, she was always looking at him, too. Maybe he thought that was strange.

But no, there was something about the way that he was looking at her that seemed…knowledgeable? Confident? Downright condescending? Why was he _smirking_ at her like that? Sarah tried to string two thoughts together, bringing her attention back to her lecture. She looked out across the auditorium, trying to look at faces that were not James. . It helped Sarah regain composure, she found, if she focused on small, unimportant details. She focused: there was a kid at the back of the room wearing a blue shirt and chewing bubble gum. He snapped it, blowing a tiny bubble and then twisting his tongue in a weird little curl to draw the gum back between his lips so that his teeth could knead it until it was the perfect consistency to blow another bubble. Sarah concentrated on him. She watched the way his jaw moved, noticed the tenseness of the muscles as they pressed his teeth against the gum, hard. She waited for his next bubble. When it popped, she tried to hear it over the sounds of everything else. And there it was, the faintest sound of a bubble bursting.

Sarah searched for something else to focus on. The gum popping had been good, but she needed more. Her gaze drifted. There was a girl near the front, not quite close enough to appear overly eager about the subject matter, but not far enough away to be one of those kids that is trying not to be noticed. This girl seemed young. She had long dark hair and wore jeans and a fairly loose-fitting shirt. She looked naïve. Not innocent, but the kind of person who tries to see the best in people. _Who is going to crush her heart and make her just as bitter as the rest of us?_, Sarah wondered. The girl could've been Sarah, back _before_, although the girl was probably closer to 18 or 19. Sarah had been 15 when she'd had her first…_episode_—event? incident? scene?...hallucination?—and that one had been the longest and most vivid. But all that Sarah could really remember about it, after years of putting bad memories away in pretty boxes, was one emotion: that of her heart being broken.

Sarah realised that her concentration had broken again. And then it happened, the unavoidable. She found herself once more looking at James. But this time, he was not looking at her. Sarah stared blankly at him. Was his hair different? Were his teeth slightly pointier? One of his eyes…it looked faintly less blue. Sarah peered…

…she felt disconnected. Although the clock was still ticking, and she was faintly aware of the students in her classroom growing more and more alarmed, it all seemed blurry and distant, like there was a frosted glass wall between her and everything else. Briefly, momentarily, she felt the relative warmth of an autumn wind. She smelled the mildew of rotting leaves and sensed the emptiness of a tree without leaves. She felt the sudden desire to buy a pumpkin and carve an ugly menacing face into it. One with a delicate smirk and pointy ears and a mullet-like hairdo. And a piercing gaze…

Sarah felt herself return to the room. It had only been a few seconds, but the atmosphere in the classroom had changed. Rather than boredom, the students were now feeling restlessness. A few near the front had noticed how Sarah's eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment, and how her sentence had trailed off in the middle of a thought. They were fairly certain she had been about to say "labyrinth", but she had barely gotten the "la-" out before she stopped.

Sarah looked up. She brushed her hair out of her face. She cleared her throat. She opened her mouth. She closed it. She began again: "You will have to excuse me, class, but I think we will have to postpone this discussion until our next class. You are all free to leave."

Then, she passed out.


	4. Chapter 4: Friends

It was very vivid here. There was dry, cool air; leafless trees and shrubs; colorless sand that glittered magnificently in the sunlight. The faintest breeze lifted her hair and pushed it back away from her face. She stood at the top of a hill, and a clear path descended from her feet to an empty clearing at the bottom. And just beyond the clearing was a grey stone wall, covered in ivy and lichen. The emptiness, the serenity, the chill…it awoke something inside of her. The tranquility here felt _distracting_; it was like she had forgotten something important.

Without really thinking about it very much, Sarah began walking, following the path in front of her that led to the stone wall at the bottom of the hill. When she reached the wall, Sarah turned right, following its length. The stone seemed wet; when she reached out to touch it, her hand came away covered in silver and translucent glitter. The faintest nagging feeling skittered across her consciousness and disappeared again, leaving behind only a feeling of panic. Sarah quickened her pace; rather than ambling along purposelessly, she was now cantering forward, looking for something. But what? A door in the wall?

…Sarah felt like she was floating…her eyes could not focus and her muscles did not respond like she wanted them to; instead of going this way, they went that way. Sarah struggled under the covers of her bed, tossing and turning and trying to turn the vague shapes and colors surrounding her into something that made _sense_…she heard a voice. What was it saying? It sounded beautiful, low and melodic and _golden_…it was familiar…she knew that voice. But if Sarah had been more coherent, she may've been surprised to discover that it awakened two simultaneous and conflicting emotions inside of her: terror and comfort. As it was, the voice triggered a visceral response. Sarah clung to the warm body beside her and screamed…

It seemed strange to Sarah that she had not yet encountered anything. The world seemed dead, in its emptiness, in its monotony. Everything was some variation of orange or gray or black. Even the sun in the sky seemed to have reddish-orangey-brown undertones. The bite in the air and the color of the atmosphere made Sarah think of it as autumn here. Which meant winter was just around the corner.

Sarah shivered and lifted her hands to turn up her collar. But she found that she had no collar, and her clothes were not what she had remembered putting on. Glancing down at her legs, Sarah thought, _Hadn't I been wearing a skirt?_ But no, she was wearing high-waist, straight-legged blue jeans, and a flimsy white gauzy shirt that fell to her thighs. And a large vest she had almost forgotten about, white and covered with scrolling gold patterns embroidered on the front and a large buckle in the back. _I haven't owned clothes like these in many years_.

A faint thought crossed Sarah's mind, and she noticed a small stagnant pool just a few feet away from the wall. She crossed the short distance and peered into the water, looking at her reflection. She did not realise that a faint bubble of hope had begun to form until it burst, making her stomach muscles tighten. The panic from earlier caught up with her, and before she knew it, Sarah's head was hanging over the pool and her stomach was heaving but nothing was coming up. A few minutes later she slumped on the ground near the pool, exhausted, with tears streaming down her face.

After a few moments Sarah became aware that someone was watching her. She looked up, and a small fat man with big round eyes and an even rounder nose was perched near her on the edge of the pool. He wore a red cap and carried at his waist an assortment of sparkly jewels. Around his wrist was an elastic bracelet with plastic beads.

"Hello, Sarah," he said quietly, in a whisper so low that Sarah could barely hear him. Yet she understood him all the same.

…Sarah's stomach clenched in pain and her eyes hurt from crying and her throat was sore from screaming. She had calmed down now, and gained a slight bit of coherence for a few minutes, and James had given her a cup of tea with a shot of whisky and a little bit of lemon juice and some honey. She was sipping it very slowly, only a small mouthful every few minutes, because she was afraid if she went too quickly she would lose herself again. James wrapped his arms around her, tucking her head into the space at his shoulder where it fit just so perfectly, and he quietly hummed a song. Every once in a while the melody touched on something familiar, but mostly he was stringing notes together in a meaningless pattern, making it up as he went along, and Sarah closed her eyes and melted into it, letting the notes crash against her like heavy waves. She was vaguely aware of James taking away her cup of tea and setting it down, but she felt herself drifting away again, riding the notes up and away and out the door and into the sky…

Sarah was not surprised that this man—dwarf?—knew her name; she was certain that she had perhaps been here before, and had surely met some of the people living here. She only wished she could _remember_. Sarah tried to blink back the tears, but they wouldn't stop coming, and the little man moved closer and patted her awkwardly on the arm. She turned and rest her head against his shoulder as more tears erupted, and she felt him tense but then relax as he grew accustomed to the weight of her.

Several moments passed and the dwarf did not say a word. Then, very solemnly, he whispered, "Shows what you know, don't it? You take too much for granted."

Sarah's sobs slowed, and then they stopped. As she lifted her face away from his shoulder, she hiccupped. She peered at the dwarf momentarily, and then asked, "What have I taken for granted?"

"Your friends, Sarah."

…and just like that, Sarah's mind came back to her. What had just moments ago been a blur of dark shapes materialized suddenly, and she recognized her surroundings as her apartment. The soft surface she was sitting on was her burgundy leather sofa. The warm body she was leaning against was her devoted loving boyfriend and also her TA, James. The cup of liquid in her hand was warm, and soothing. And now, she remembered.

"HOGGLE!"


	5. Chapter 5: Reality?

The comfortable feeling that had just moments ago settled in Sarah's mind was now shifting restlessly. She was back in her apartment, sure, and it was familiar, but it felt different somehow. Like going back to her old room in the house she grew up in, only to discover that nothing had changed about it except for her. Everything was the same and yet everything was different. _There's a good word for that_, Sarah thought. _Perspective_.

The most noticeable difference for Sarah was that she now had a great sense of mental clarity. While just a few moments ago she had been slipping in and out of reality, right now she felt the mental equivalent of a sailor standing on stable ground for the first time after being away at sea for months on end. There was the slight, memorable mental tingle that Sarah liked to call her "psychotic sea legs;" she had experienced this feeling before with previous _episodes_. The familiarity of the sensation caused a laugh to bubble forth in her throat — the sea legs were making Sarah feel giddy and triumphant. She had _remembered_ something! After packing away her delusions into little boxes for so long, Sarah had finally accessed a part of herself that she had long forgotten, and she was finally feeling _real_ again! It was a difficult sensation to describe, but it translated into euphoria.

Sarah jumped up from the couch suddenly and began searching under piles of papers for her handheld. She felt a sense of urgency. She needed to dial someone _now_, thank you very much, and where _was_ that blasted phone? James stayed on the couch, flustered. A moment passed where it seemed like he was going to stop Sarah, calm her down, ask for answers, but the moment was fleeting, and before he knew it Sarah had found the phone and had already called someone on speed dial.

The line rang and then there was a mechanical click, and a sleepy voice on the other end of the line said "Hello?"

"Gwendolyn? It's Sarah! Can you put Toby on please? ...yes, I realise it's after nine. No, I know the baby's asleep. I wouldn't call if it weren't important."

After a few moments, during which Sarah could hear faint muffled conversation, Toby's familiar voice came on the phone. "Sarah, you know you're not supposed to call after nine—"

"Yes, I know that, Toby, would you just listen for a sec? Be the caring younger brother I know you are and not the self-important family man you're pretending to be right now." After that quick outburst, Sarah lost some of her momentum and paused for a moment to let Toby respond. _Ok, maybe it wasn't the smartest thing to attack him right now._

Sarah could hear Toby breathing as she waited for him to respond. When he did, his tone was hard to read. He seemed colder, perhaps because he felt affronted, yet at the same time Sarah could hear the concern in his voice. "Ok, Sarah, what's up?"

"Toby, do you remember anything about what happened when I was fifteen? After my first… episode, hallucination, whatever? I know you were really little, but do you remember anything?"

There was a long pause, a heavy sigh, and then Toby answered. "Sarah, you know I don't like to talk about that. You were… not healthy for a long time. And even when you started getting better, people gossiped. You made middle school hard for me, Sarah."

"I'm sorry, Toby. You know I'm sorry." Sarah waited.

After a while, Toby spoke again. "You liked to tell me stories when I was little. I think you made them up; I don't remember you reading to me from books or anything. But there were always these adventures about a princess who had somehow earned her freedom from an evil tyrant, and she went on adventures with her friends. I don't really remember much about the stories. But besides the princess, there were her friend, the little fox that rode around on a dog like a knight, and the giant beast that could talk to rocks, and the little dwarf who liked to steal shiny things. Sometimes I wish I could remember the stories better… I think they would make Wendy laugh."

"Did I ever say who the evil tyrant was?"

"You know, I really don't remember you saying anything about him. But I always had a really clear picture of him in mind. You know how it is, like when you read a book and you get this really vivid picture of what one of the characters looks like? And then when they make a movie version of it the actor never looks right. Well anyhow, I always pictured him as this kind of dramatic flamboyant guy, who liked to sing about how evil he was. And he liked glitter. And leather boots. And did he keep a horde of goblins around him all the time? I can't remember. Do you remember any goblins, Sarah?"

At that, Sarah smirked. "No, Toby, I don't remember any goblins." In a sarcastic tone, she added, "but the evil guy sounds scary. All that glitter and leather. Did he like Spandex? Was he a member of an 80s glam rock band?" Sarah couldn't help it; she started to giggle. On the other end of the line, Toby huffed.

"Ok, yeah, fine Sarah. Laugh all you want. I was only answering your questions because you said it was urgent."

Sarah stopped giggling then, and grew quite serious. "I had another episode, Toby."

Toby faltered. "When? Tonight?"

"A few days ago, actually. I only just recovered. James was here."

"And he didn't call me?"

"It probably didn't cross his mind."

"But he should've called! Are you ok?"

"I'm fine now. Listen, I should probably go."

"Sarah, you can't just announce something like that and leave! …Sarah?...Sarah!" All Toby heard was the dial tone as Sarah hung up.


End file.
